Imagine if the next best search engine was like an early version of bing and NOTHING else existed.

And nobody was remotely close to releasing anything better. Would you pay for it then?

If OpenAI starts charging for chatGPT, whatcha gonna do? Keep writing shit by hand?

The computional requirements are so expensive that realistically this is going to be a paid service maybe forever.

I say forever because compute will get much cheaper over time, but the best models will use even more compute and be much smarter. All the elite people will be using top end models, plebs using free models won't have the same resources.